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"If adversity and hopeless grief have quite taken away the taste for life; if an unfortunate man, strong of soul and more indignant about his fate than despondent or dejected, wishes for death and yet preserves his life without loving it, not from inclination or fear but from duty, then his maxim has moral content."
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"Deeply consider that it is your duty and interest to read the Holy Scriptures."

"The man who passes the sentence should swing the sword. If you would take a man's life, you owe it to him to look into his eyes and hear his final words. And if you cannot bear to do that, then perhaps the man does not deserve to die."

"You and I, we must carry on, Gemma. I cannot afford the luxury of love. I must marry well. And now I must look after you. It is my duty.""If you wish to suffer, you do so of your own free will, not on my behalf. Or Father's or Grandmama's or anyone's. You are a fine physician, Thomas. Why is that not enough?""Because it isn't," he says with a rare candor. "Only this and the hope of nothing more? A quiet respectability with no true greatness or heroism in it, with only my reputation to recommend me. So you see, Gemma, you are not the only one who cannot rule her own life."

"If he trips he must be sustained. If he makes mistakes they must be covered. If he sleeps he must not be wantonly disturbed. If he is no good he must be pole-axed."

"Our honor means no more than our lives, so long as the realm is safe."

"I write because something inner and unconscious forces me to. That is the first compulsion. The second is one of ethical and moral duty. I feel responsible to tell stories that inspire readers to consider more deeply who they are."

"Partisanship is our great curse. We too readily assume that everything has two sides and that it is our duty to be on one or the other."
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"A categorical imperative would be one which represented an action as objectively necessary in itself, without reference to any other purpose."

"As nature has uncovered from under this hard shell the seed for which she most tenderly cares - the propensity and vocation to free thinking - this gradually works back upon the character of the people, who thereby gradually become capable of managing freedom; finally, it affects the principles of government, which finds it to its advantage to treat men, who are now more than machines, in accordance with their dignity."

"Reason should take on anew the most difficult of all its tasks, namely, that of self-knowledge, and to institute a court of justice, by which reason may secure its rightful claims while dismissing all its groundless pretensions, and this not by mere decrees but according to its own eternal and unchangeable laws; and this court is none other than the critique of pure reason itself."

"Immaturity is the incapacity to use one's intelligence without the guidance of another."

"What is more, we cannot do morality a worse service than by seeing to derive it from examples. Every example of it presented to me must first itself be judged by moral principles in order to decide if it is fit to serve as an original example...even the Holy One of the gospel must first be compared with our ideal of moral perfection before we can recognize him to be such."

"We must admit thatlaw must be valid, not merely for men, but for all rational creatures generally, not merely under certain contingent conditions or with exceptions, but with absolute necessity."
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